Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Is Clumsy And Obvious, But It Gets The Job Done

About halfway through Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, writer/director Scott Cooper’s noisy new Bruce Springsteen biopic, I got restless. My seat was uncomfortable. I was hungry. I could see just about every music-biopic cliché coming, and I knew I’d have to get through all of them before I could stretch my legs and find an open burrito spot. But then the picture arrived at the scene where Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce Springsteen records “Born In The USA” with the full E Street Band behind him. The film had already shown Springsteen recording that song as a moody acoustic demo. But when those drum-hits and that triumphant keyboard riff came in, the song was transformed, and so was the theater. I forgot all about cramped seats and burritos, and I was transfixed.

You have to invest a whole lot to get to a magical moment like that “Born In The USA” scene, and I’m not just talking about the price of movie tickets nowadays. In making Deliver Me From Nowhere, Scott Cooper made the admirable choice to avoid the compressed sweep of so many music biopics, opting instead to focus on a discrete chunk of Bruce Springsteen’s career, the moment when he made the unearthly 1982 album Nebraska. But even with that level of focus and direction, we still have to get through a whole lot of rote, obligatory biopic business. To write his songs, Springsteen has to flash back on his abusive relationship with his father, rendered in hacky black-and-white. We have to see him gnash and sweat and rage, and then we have to watch a record-label suit — Al Teller, portrayed with oily glee by David Krumholtz — whining that he can’t sell this shit. Some of those scenes seem to keep going forever. But then you get to something like that “Born In The USA” moment, and all is instantly forgiven.

There are precious few Deliver Me From Nowhere scenes of Springsteen rocking out with the E Street Band, but those scenes are fucking magic. Jeremy Allen White doesn’t look much like Springsteen, and he’s too nervy and internal an actor to convey the sloppy golden retriever side of the Boss’ garrulous public persona. But White looks fucking great — his hair is immaculate throughout — and he commits. If he sometimes sounds like he’s doing a Bruce Springsteen impression, well, so does Bruce Springsteen. It’s appropriate, I think, for an actor as broody as White to play Springsteen, as long as we’re only focused on the making of Springsteen’s broodiest album. And when White gets a chance to get out there in front of the band, he becomes a different creature. It feels utterly unreal.

It’s impossible not to compare Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere to last year’s big music biopic, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Like A Complete Unknown, Deliver Me From Nowhere presents a limited chunk of its hero’s career arc, though the Bob Dylan movie is a little more expansive in its selection. Both movies feature hot young actors in showcase roles that allow them to sing, play guitar, have cool clothes and cool hair, and radiate charisma in every direction. Both of them have fictionalized love stories; in this case, it’s Odessa Young as Faye Romano, a made-up composite of a bunch of Springsteen girlfriends. The comparison isn’t fair. A Complete Unknown fucking rocks. Somehow, Mangold hits a ton of the regular biopic beats without making them feel obvious, and I get swept up in the romance of everything. Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan as an unknowable sphinx. Jeremy Allen White doesn’t have that option, and he’s trapped in a much clumsier film.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is clumsy. It’s clumsy all over the place. Characters have entire conversations in liner-note verbiage. I’m willing to bet that Jon Landau, played here with great warmth by Jeremy Strong, might speak in liner-note verbiage, since he was a rock critic before he became Springsteen’s manager. But even in the rock-critic world, I’ve only met a few people whose conversation sounds like liner notes. I can think of a few, but they’re rare. Everyone else, though? Engineers, execs, Laundau’s barely-a-character wife — would they talk like that? Probably not, right? That kept taking me out of it.

We rely on reader subscriptions to deliver articles like the one you’re reading. Become a member and help support independent media!
Subscribe now

Other things kept taking me out of it, too. There are so many black-and-white flashback scenes, and they mostly seem to exist to literalize some of Springsteen’s Nebraska lyrics, to explain things that don’t need to be explained. Scott Cooper commits the unforced error of including multiple clips from better movies, forcing us to consider whether we’d be spending our time better rewatching Badlands or Night Of The Hunter instead. And also, are we supposed to believe that Springsteen just kept encountering Badlands while flipping through channels, over and over again? That seems unlikely. Some of the problem is just that the songwriting process — especially this songwriting process, done without the man’s extremely fun-to-watch band — is inherently uncinematic. The film, for instance, tries to visualize Springsteen’s interest in the Charles Starkweather murder cases by showing him at the library, digging through newspaper articles on microfiche, like he’s a few decades too early to become a true-crime podcaster. Then, we see an aha moment where he goes through his notebook, changing “Nebraska” into a first-person song by crossing out every “he” and writing “I” instead.

Cooper makes a lot of frustrating decisions when telling this story, and I wish he had the same bare, economical narrative instincts that Springsteen himself displays on Nebraska. But with all that said, I had a great time watching Deliver Me From Nowhere. Fundamentally, I am aligned with Scott Cooper here. The film seems to exist so that Cooper can hold up Nebraska and say, “Holy shit, can you believe that this guy made this album at this point in his career? It’s fucking awesome!” He’s right. It is awesome. At this point, we know that Bruce Springsteen has complete vault albums falling out of his pockets like loose change, so I’m a little less inclined to believe that the man beat his head against the wall while trying to dredge these songs up out of his soul. But if Cooper wants to show me a scene of a tortured Springsteen speeding his sick-ass hot rod down a back-country highway while blasting Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” I’m not going to say no.

If you’re not at least a casual Bruce Springsteen fan, then I don’t know why you’d go see this movie. It probably won’t convince you. You’ll be bored and annoyed. But if you’re already into Nebraska, it’s a blast to watch these actors pantomiming all these mythic moments of creation. The joy of the movie isn’t revelatory. You won’t have too many lightning bolts. Instead, the pleasures are the same ones you might get from a comic-book movie. They’re in the recognition of seeing versions of scenes that have lived in your imagination for years. It’s so fucking cool that Bruce Springsteen accidentally made a masterpiece by himself on cheap analog equipment when he thought he was just taping demos for his band. That’s the kind of story that deserves its own movie, and now it has one.

Maybe there are too many scenes of Jeremy Strong’s Jon Landau patiently explaining the momentous thing that Springsteen has just done, but I agree with him, and it’s fun to hear this thing I already know explained. (The widely mocked trailer scene of Landau saying that Springsteen will soon be ready to fix America is mercifully absent from the actual film.) It’s even more fun to see the audio-nerd side of the album — a game Paul Walter Hauser setting up the brand-new four-track in Springsteen’s bedroom, the tortuous process of making those home-recorded demos sound professional enough for vinyl mastering. Lots of little details are fun. It’s brilliant, for instance, that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Brian Chase has the role of E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, even if he’s only in a couple of scenes. And it’s very cute that Marc Maron is tasked with explaining that of course the tapes sound bad, Springsteen made them at home. (Maron does a good job underplaying the obvious joke there.) I just liked watching this stuff. Even the really hackiest business, like the childhood flashbacks, still has its good points, like Stephen Graham’s controlled-burn performance as Springsteen’s father.

Have you ever been to Asbury Park? It’s an amazing place, so shabby and so beautiful at the same time, and it still more or less looks the way it did years ago. Bruce Springsteen owns Asbury Park. When you wander down that boardwalk, you might catch flashbacks to some other cultural moments — a few key Sopranos scenes, the ECW pay-per-view where Taz and Bam Bam Bigelow crashed through the ring. But even if you’re not a fan, you will feel like you are living in a Bruce Springsteen song. Every inch of that place is written into the man’s iconography, to the point where you’ve probably absorbed it through osmosis just by living in the last 50 years.

Asbury Park is the great special effect in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. The love-story subplot honestly isn’t all that important to the overall narrative. It takes up a lot of real estate; Odessa Young probably gets way more screen time than most of her higher-billed co-stars. But that stuff feels crucial because it gets us all around Asbury Park — lots of sweaty moments in the Stone Pony, a few dreamlike scenes on the carousel, some decent diner action. That subplot is also pretty emotionally resonant, partly because it doesn’t reach a satisfying ending and partly because Scott Cooper doesn’t have to face the burden of conveying facts. He can just tell a story there.

I should note that I saw Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere under the best circumstances possible. Last night, just a day before it opens for real, the picture played at my local old-timey movie palace as the opening-night selection in the Virginia Film Festival. Scott Cooper is from Virginia and on the festival’s advisory board, and though he wasn’t there, he sent in a message that screened before it started. I was in a big room full of people who were excited to be there, who wanted to believe in the magic of cinema and in the power of Bruce Springsteen. They laughed at stuff that wasn’t obviously funny, like the faces that all the characters make while hearing Nebraska for the first time. They cheered. They whooped. I had a bunch of friends there. It was a great night.

I probably won’t ever rewatch Deliver Me From Nowhere at home. Without a crowd, the magic will be gone, and all the frustrating stuff will come into clearer focus. But in a room full of excited people, those flaws melt away. If you don’t care about Bruce Springsteen, you can probably skip this one. Nobody will blame you. But if you do care, then I advise you to get a bunch of friends together and see it with as big an audience as possible. Find a screening that looks like it’s going to sell out, and get in there. When the Born In The USA scene happens, maybe you’ll feel what I felt.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere opens wide tonight, via 20th Century Studios.